Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [192]
“It was a long, long time ago,” the engineer said. “I have tried to forget.”
“When did it end?” I asked.
No answer.
“In 1952?” I asked. Still no answer. “In 1953…1954…?”
“At least through the 1980s it was still going on,” he said.
“I believe you should tell me the whole story,” I said. “Otherwise, once you are gone, you will take the truth with you.”
“You don’t want to know,” he said.
“I do.”
“You don’t have a need-to-know,” he said.
For many months, I tried to learn more. I got pieces. Slivers of pieces. One-word details. “This” confirmed and “that” reconfirmed, regarding what he had previously said. One day, when we were eating lunch in a restaurant, I recounted back to the engineer everything I knew. I asked for his permission to put it all in this book. He did not say yes. He did not say no. We interviewed for more than one year. Then one day, I asked him how much of the story I now knew.
“You don’t know half of it,” he said sadly.
I took a crouton, left over from my lunch, and set it down in the middle of the restaurant’s white china plate. “If what I know equals this crouton,” I said, pointing at the little brown piece of bread, “then is what I don’t know as big as this plate?”
“Oh, my dear,” he said, shaking his head. “The whole truth is bigger than this table we are eating on, including the chairs.”
He wouldn’t say more. He said he was hurting. That soon he would die. That, really, it was best that I did not learn any more because I didn’t have a need-to-know. But it is not just me who needs to know. We need to be able to keep secrets, but this kind of secret-keeping—of this kind of secret—is the work of totalitarian states, like the one we fought against for five decades during the Cold War. Fighting totalitarianism was America’s rationale for building seventy thousand nuclear weapons in sixty-five styles. In a free and open democratic society, conducting projects in the name of science is one thing. Keeping forty-year-old secrets from a president even after he tries to find them out is an entirely different problem for a democratic nation. It sets a precedent. It makes it easier for a group of powerful men to set up a program that defies the Constitution and defiles morality in the name of science and national security, all under the deceptive cover that no one has a need-to-know. I believe that even though the engineer didn’t tell me everything, that is why he told me what he did.
According to my source, the Atomic Energy Commission conducted experiments on humans in a classified government facility in the Nevada desert beginning in 1951. Although this was done in direct violation of the Nuremberg Code of 1947, it is far from the first time the Commission had acted in violation of the most basic moral principle involving voluntary human consent. In 1993, reporter Eileen Welsome wrote a newspaper story stating that the Atomic Energy Commission had conducted plutonium experiments on human beings, most notably retarded children and orphan boys from the Fernald State School, outside Boston, without the children’s or their guardians’ knowledge or consent. After this horrible revelation came to light, President Clinton opened an investigation to look into what the Atomic Energy Commission had done and the secrets it had been able to safeguard inside its terrifying and unprecedented system of secret-keeping. I asked the engineer why President Clinton hadn’t learned about the S-4 facility at Area 51—or had he?
“I think he might have come very close,” the engineer said about President Clinton. “But they kept it from him.”
“Who are they?” I asked. The engineer told me that his elite group had been given the keys to the original facility at Area 51. “Who inherited those keys from you five engineers?” I wanted to know.
“You don’t have a need-to-know